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    <title>The Kawa Scheme language</title>
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    <section class="chapter" title="The Kawa Scheme language" epub:type="chapter" id="Top">
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            <h1 class="title">The Kawa Scheme language</h1>
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      <p>Kawa is a general-purpose programming language that runs on the Java platform.
It aims to combine:
</p>
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            <p>the benefits of dynamic scripting languages
(non-verbose code with less boiler-plate, fast and easy start-up,
a <a class="ulink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read-eval-print_loop" target="_top">REPL</a>,
no required compilation step); with
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            <p>the benefits of traditional compiled languages (fast execution, static error detection,
modularity, zero-overhead Java platform integration).
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      <p>It is an extension of the long-established <a class="ulink" href="http://www.schemers.org/" target="_top">Scheme</a>
language, which is in the Lisp family of programming languages.
Kawa has many <a class="link" href="Features.xhtml" title="Features">useful features</a>.
</p>
      <p>Kawa is also a useful <a class="link" href="Framework.xhtml" title="The Kawa language framework">framework</a> for implementing
other programming languages on the Java platform.
It has many useful utility classes.
</p>
      <p>This manual describes version 2.92_invoke, updated 26 April 2017.
See the summary of <a class="link" href="news.xhtml" title="News - Recent Changes">recent changes</a>.
</p>
      <p>The <a class="link" href="tutorial-index.xhtml" title="Kawa Scheme Tutorial">Kawa tutorial</a> is useful to get stated.
While it is woefully incomplete, it does link to some other more in-depth
(but not Kawa-specific) Scheme tutorials.
</p>
      <p>For copyright information on the software and documentation,
see <a class="link" href="License.xhtml" title="License">License</a>.
</p>
      <p>Various people and orgnizations <a class="link" href="Acknowledgements.xhtml" title="Acknowledgements and thanks">have contributed to Kawa</a>.
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      <p>This package has nothing to do with the defunct Kawa commercial Java IDE.
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